Examples of Good Writing

There are lots of great papers out there, but they are typically surrounded by vast oceans of poop (much like almost every other cultural artifact). Here are some examples, but this is by no means meant to be a complete or exclusive list, and we’d love it if people would add examples to this list. It is currently focused on papers; we could expand this to include books and other forms of writing, but it seems that traditional papers would be the most useful as examples for Senior Seminar.

Genetic Programming for Finite Algebras

The work described in this paper won a Gold Medal (and some nice money) in the Human Competitive Results contest at the 2008 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference. It is a nice example of a paper with some pretty significant math that is still quite readable.

http://hampshire.edu/lspector/gpfa-gecco-2008/

GP-Gammon: Using Genetic Programming to Evolve Backgammon Players

This also won a Human Competitive Result prize. It’s worth noting that Lee Spector (first author on the Finite Algebras paper) and Moshe Sipper (first author on this paper) have been consistently competitive for these sorts of awards over the years. This sort of consistency is obviously a sign of good work, but it’s also a sign of good writing and presenting skills, since the ability to communicate your work is crucial to your overall success.

http://www.genetic-programming.org/hc2005/Sipper-GP-Gammon-Final.pdf

Go To Statement Considered Harmful

Stephen Adams suggested this, and it is indeed a gem. It’s entirely possible, for example, that no one has had such a profound effect with so few words at any other point in the history of the field. Note that while this appeared in a refereed journal, it’s not really a “standard” paper, but more of a note.

http://www.u.arizona.edu/~rubinson/copyright_violations/Go_To_Considered_Harmful.html

Abstraction mechanisms in CLU

This paper from 1977 won ACM SIGSOFT Impact Paper Award, which reflects its long-term impact.

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=359789

Now it’s your turn - share some suggestions!


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